Rantz: HUD homelessness report an absolute joke by ignoring drugs, mental health

If the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) were serious about addressing homelessness, it might consider at least acknowledging some leading contributors to the crisis: addiction and untreated mental health issues. Yet, its latest report tiptoes around these realities, avoiding the words “drugs” and “addiction” altogether. It’s a staggering oversight that renders the report a nearly useless masterclass in bureaucratic denial. Still, the data HUD did collect showed the state of Washington to have the third-highest rate of homelessness in the country. You can thank your local Democrat leader for the continued failure.

If you read any media reporting on part one of HUD’s 2024 Annual Homelessness Assessment Report (AHAR) to Congress, you get the impression that an 18.1% increase in homelessness at the end of 2023 was, as the Associated Press noted, “driven mostly by a lack of affordable housing as well as devastating natural disasters and a surge of migrants in several parts of the country.” None of the claims are backed up in the report. Rather, reporters are lifting these claims from a press release and a few short paragraphs in a report they almost certainly didn’t even peruse, let alone read.

Part One of the study offers data points on homelessness without any meaningful analysis. It’s based on a Point-in-Time count where volunteers in the first 10 days of the year literally count the number of people they see homeless on the streets or in shelter. It’s not especially accurate. The report provides very short claims about homelessness, presumably ones that will be explored at greater length in Part Two, when it’s released in the new year.

But in the limited information presented, HUD under the Biden administration indicates little interest in being truly forthcoming about the homelessness crisis. This can likely be explained by the simple fact that Democrat-backed policies have made homelessness worse.

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HUD is dishonest with the cause of homelessness

HUD blames homelessness primarily on the country’s “worsening national affordable housing crisis, rising inflation, stagnating wages among middle- and lower-income households, and the persisting effects of systemic racism.” It adds that illegal immigration and displacement from natural disasters made the data worse.

Left-wing media will focus on the “affordable housing crisis” because it most aligns with their political agenda. They spent the entire presidential campaign cycle telling viewers, readers and listeners that inflation was down, wages were up, and the economy was thriving. They couldn’t figure out why anyone would think otherwise. While they’ll pick up the numbers from natural disasters because it feeds into their climate change hysteria, they’ll ignore the data about illegal immigration because it might strengthen the American people’s view on strengthening security at the border.

Somehow, however, the HUD report completely missed addiction — whether to alcohol, opioids, methamphetamine, or another substance — as a major driver of homelessness. Mental health crises often compound the issue. Yet HUD couldn’t be bothered to offer even a passing reference to these issues, instead inventing “systemic racism” as a way to explain the numbers. The agency’s refusal to name these factors — along with a media environment that won’t call this out — demonstrates either willful ignorance or a desire to appease progressive activists who push “Housing First” and “harm reduction” policies devoid of accountability or treatment requirements.

HUD ignores drug addiction and mental health crisis in homelessness report

The situation on the ground in America’s most liberal cities lays bare the crisis.

Consider Seattle/King County, where the 2024 Point-in-Time count found 63% of unsheltered homeless reported a substance use disorder, mental health issue, or both. It explains why the county has seen a historic rise in fatal drug overdoses in the last several years. And while even the county admits these numbers underrepresent how bad the crisis really is, they still pretend that “homelessness is an outcome of structural racism and racial inequities.”

It is true that these drug-addicted and/or mentally ill homeless people struggle with housing affordability. An honest assessment, however, would note that they can’t afford a home because they’re addicted to drugs and/or mentally ill, rather than being an addict and/or mentally ill because they can’t afford a home.

When reviewing the number of unsheltered homeless reporting a substance use disorder, mental health issue, or both, they were similarly dire in San Francisco and Los Angeles counties (51%).

These counties virtually mirror the homelessness prevention strategies favored by the Radical Left that are used in King County: Housing First and Harm Reduction. There’s no data to show either approaches have meaningfully worked to address homelessness.

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HUD boosts Housing First and Harm Reduction

HUD’s decision to skirt around addiction and mental health mirrors its misguided embrace of “Housing First” and “Harm Reduction” strategies. Indeed, the data appears intentionally ignored as a means to continue to promote both failed strategies.

Housing First prioritizes getting people into permanent subsidized housing while neglecting the critical need for addiction treatment or mental health care. Under this strategy, a drug addict is given a free home without a mandate that he or she get drug addiction treatment. Predictably, the results are disastrous. Individuals brought in from the streets die from a drug overdose, destroy provided housing or return to encampments because the root causes of their homelessness remain unaddressed.

Harm Reduction, meanwhile, claims to mitigate the threat of illicit substance abuse by providing clean drug paraphernalia and even supervision to the drug addict. This approach can help slow the spread of diseases, though it enables drug addiction. As it turns out, handing out fentanyl pipes and freebasing kits doesn’t stop prevent a fatal overdose. But when addicts die, they’ll have died free from hepatitis or HIV.

The city of Seattle, via its Navigation Team, had seen some success tackling drug abusing homeless people. Police would enforce laws and social workers would push treatment. But it was officially dismantled by progressive city officials in 2020 as part of the Black Lives Matter activism that defunded the Seattle Police Department. The team offered not just shelter but pathways to treatment. Without it, the city saw a spike in overdose deaths among the unhoused, with King County reporting historic surges in fatal overdoses each year after. That culminated in an all-time high of 1,339 overdose deaths in 2023 — a 214% increase since 2019.

HUD’s homelessness report is another missed opportunity

HUD’s failure to even mention addiction in its analysis is a disservice to the very people it claims to help.

By pretending homelessness is a purely economic problem solvable with progressive housing policies, the agency ignores decades of evidence — and the grim reality faced by cities like Seattle. The addiction crisis is not just a contributing factor to homelessness; it is a defining one.

If HUD truly wants to combat homelessness, it would advocate for a balanced approach that includes mandatory treatment for substance abuse and mental health care alongside temporarily subsidized housing. Ignoring the issue won’t make it go away. But as it stands, this report is little more than a bureaucratic fairy tale — a “safe space” for policymakers either too timid to address the hard truths or evil enough to know they can get away with lies and half-truths in order to satisfy a radical political agenda.

For cities and taxpayers, the message is clear: if HUD refuses to name the problem, it has no hope of solving it. And while they made matters worse with their embrace of Housing First and Harm Reduction, we should be deeply concerned about the results of backing their proposals around housing affordability. Until addiction and mental health issues are front and center in our homelessness strategies, expect the crisis—and the human suffering it entails—to worsen.

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